Search queries, especially the ones that are in the form of questions are a great way to look for seed keywords.

Each of these queries have motivations & emotions of people behind it. Often, the queries are specific and centered around a users problem and so provide new keyword opportunities. Perhaps, one of the best but very underutilized sources of research for your keyword ideas.

At the end of this exercise, you’ll have a list of content categories to cover on your blog. To keep this example simple, I’m going with just 3 categories for now:

Feng Shui Office Plants

Feng Shui Indoor Plants

Feng Shui Artificial Plants

At this point, you’ll know what content you’ll be covering, and where each post would go. For example, if you write a post called, “Top X air purifying Feng Shui plants for your home”, you’ll know which category it would go under.

Step #2: Create a site navigation that reflects the content organization

Now, if we were to create the navigation menu for our example website, we’d include the obvious pages like About, Blog, Store, and Contact. But in addition to these, we’d also add two more pages “Feng Shui Office Plants” and “Feng Shui Indoor Plants” right inside the main menu.

Now why would we add those two pages to our menu?

Well, because doing so will help us rank our website for those target keywords.

How?

With the help or cornerstone content.

Cornerstone content, as Yoast explains, is a critical part of the SEO big picture. This cornerstone content is nothing but a “one single page that is the center of the content about that topic.”

So on our cornerstone content page for “Feng Shui Office Plants”, we’d write some simple content on the topic and link to each and every article that we have on our site under this category.

If a user searches for “feng shui office plants” there’s a great possibility that Google shows our cornerstone content page for it. And when the user clicks through and lands on our page, they will find links to the most relevant articles around the topic they were searching for.

“… has the minimum amount of links possible between the homepage and any given page. This is helpful because it allows link juice (ranking power) to flow throughout the entire site, thus increasing the ranking potential for each page.”

Step #3: Build a rich internal link network

Once you’ve planned your content and set up a solid architecture to hold it, your last step is to use internal links to glue it all together. Users and search engines will use these links to learn more about the related content on your site.

Both Yoast and Moz recommend the same linking strategy: They suggest linking each content piece to a resource that’s present one level higher and lower in the information hierarchy.

Site link architecture design

Look at the following image to get an idea. As you can see, the homepage links to the page about Feng Shui office plants. And this page in turn links to the various content pieces on the topic. Likewise, these content pieces or posts all link back to the cornerstone page.

An SEO-friendly way to set internal links

By doing so, Yoast explains that you boost your SEO “Because you’re linking from pages that are closely related to each other content-wise ….”

Each time that you post anything new in any of your categories, refresh your cornerstone content page on that topic with a link to the new article. Also, link to the cornerstone content page from the new article. Zac Heinrichs from Portent tells how this step can enhance the SEO of newer content pieces. He says:

“You can get search engines to naturally index new content more quickly by linking to it from high value pages like your home or category pages.”

Wrapping it up…

So that’s about it for building a SEO-friendly site architecture. I hope you have learned something useful from this article.